Hi there I'll be handling your Lesson 1 critique.

So first things first I'll comment on the most common mistake I see through your exercises. Across all of your exercises you tend to be fairly accurate in hitting both your intended starting and ending points, however your lines and ellipses wobble quite a fair bit. This tells me that you're most likely focusing on accuracy more than creating intentional confident marks and smooth ellipses using the ghosting method. Remember that at this point in the course we're focused on creating confident smooth motions, if they are overshoot their boundaries that's totally fine accuracy improves with time, but our primary goal is straight confident lines, and smooth ellipses using our shoulder.

Ok so with that out of the way let's go over your Lines exercises. Your super imposed lines don't have much fraying but they wobble, your ghosted lines and planes show a similar pattern where they hit their marks but also wobble. I'm glad you experimented a bit with different shapes of planes, your pages in this section are a bit bare which is ok in the sense that you determine what you consider to be a page of work, remember though that while grinding is discouraged the more mileage you get on a page the more chances you have show your understanding of the concepts to not only us but yourself.

On to your Ellipses, I'm happy to see that you experimented with sizes and shapes in your tables. You managed to mostly hit the boundaries you place on yourself with your ellipses in planes, again the biggst fault with this section is that your ellipses aren't as smooth as they could be. The tightness of your ellipses will improve with mileage as well, so it's not as big a concern as the smoothness. You did an ok job with your funnels as well, while doing this exercise as a warm up in the future you may want to experiment with more sizes and shapes of funnels, also a common mistake for people is that they don't keep the central minor axis of the funnel dividing their ellipses equally as shown here. (https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/notaligned) It's definitely a tricky thing to accomplish at this stage so don't pressure yourself too much when you miss it, but keep in mind it's much harder to do when your ellipses aren't smooth.

Lastly let's go over your Boxes. Your plotted perspective boxes exercise is missing. (https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/plottedperspective)

In your rough perspective exercise I can see that you tried to keep your horizontal lines parallel and your vertical lines perpendicular to the horizon line, the wobbliness of your lines make your boxes look less solid then they should be however. I'm glad to see you drew your correction lines to the horizon line correctly, and while not as accurate as they could be it shows you have an understanding of what the exercise was asking of you.

You had a good attempt at the rotated box exercise, your boxes could be spaced a bit more evenly and you could have achieved more rotation but these last 2 exercises are meant to be very difficult for people new to this so the fact you achieved any rotation at all is something to be proud of. You'll notice that the boxes directly horizontal and vertical of the center box do achieve more rotation and you struggled with the corner areas, this is totally fine and expected at this point, it's tricky but the 250 box challenge will help you understand the 3D space and some of the concepts being asked of you here and in the organic box exercise. Outside of your line wobbliness in this exercise the biggest mistakes honestly are that you attempted to redraw some of the lines instead of being confident in them to begin with (remember not to redraw things, we have to be confident in our marks and live with the mistake as tough as it may sound) and that your hatching lines in the spaces between each box is quite messy, remember that we ghost every mark we make in this course and that includes when we shade. As tedious as it may sound it's honestly harms an image more if you scribble down hatching marks and your image without them looks more solid in this case.

To wrap things up we have your organic boxes, I feel like this is a great start honestly. Out of all the sections you've shown I feel like the 2nd section on each page are the strongest of the 6 as they have the biggest difference in size between boxes that are close and further away. You tend to play it a bit too safe with your sizes and it can make things look a little flat, but those 2 I mentioned are defintely achieving what was asked of you.

Overall you had a bit of a rough start but it shows a lot of potential and a good understanding of what was being asked. Once you learn to be confident in your mark making and apply the ghosting method correctly your quality of work will jump up quite a bit, and the 250 box challenge will help expand your understanding of some of the box making techniques being asked of you in these last 2 exercises.

With that being said, while you showed an understanding of most of the concepts being asked I'm not going to move you on just yet. I'd like you to resubmit your Plotted Perspective exercise and also redo one page where you split the page in half. Half the page will be ghosted planes, and half the page will be a table of ellipses. I'd normally ask for a page of ellipses in planes but because you're showing hesitation in both lines and ellipses I don't want you to potentially hesitate by the borders you create around the ellipse.

So remember that your primary goal is smooth confident lines and ellipses. We don't expect perfection and if they over shoot your intended mark and aren't fully accurate that is fine, we just want you to present your best work and I know you can do better than what was shown here. Once you submit that work and it shows you can make confident marks, I'll have no problem moving you on to the 250 box challenge.

i read the critique from nihlex... and i guess i'm getting a similar one :)

thank you for sharing your work with me, ccm